Wednesday 4 November 2009 04.40 EST
First published on Wednesday 4 November 2009 04.40 EST

There are few foods that reward a bit of care and attention quite as well as the simple banger. A poorly made supermarket sausage can be an awful thing; recycling the worst waste meats and packed with fillers, fluids and modifiers enough to choke a goat. Yet a properly made artisanal sausage from an honest butcher calls forth hymns of praise from the lucky consumer. What too few of us seem to realise is how little effort it can take to go one better and actually make our own sausages, controlling quality and flavours and producing something immeasurably more transcendent than the dispiriting slurry-packed condom in the polystyrene tray on the chiller shelf.

Many are put off by the simple process - laid out for your convenience here - by worries about materials or equipment but this needn't be a problem. Sausages require no more than pork, seasonings, casings and a mincer. Let's deal with the biggest of those first. It's possible to buy hand-operated mincers which not only chop the meat but also, with the blade removed pack it into the skin for you. These are reasonably successful but producing a single kilo of sausage will leave you with a hypertrophic forearm like a fiddler crab on steroids. Far better to search the houses of friends and relatives and seek out the individual with the biggest kitchen mixer. The best can be fitted with a mincer so it's worth clubbing together with friends to buy the attachment for the rare occasions it will be used. I borrowed a new Kenwood Chef for the demo and watched it cheerfully shift to low gear and satisfyingly reduce a small pig to paste.

Sausages skins are called 'casings' and come in two types. Collagen casings are made from reconstituted meat products and extruded into a long, regular tube. They are great for things like Frankfurters but for a real sausage you need to go straight for the guts - traditional 'natural' casings are scrubbed, cleaned lengths of animal intestine. I order mine from sausagemaking.org who send them by post. Trust me, there are few more satisfying sounds to the epicure than that of 40 metres of pig gut landing on your doormat.

With mincer and casings procured, the rest, as you'll see from the pictures, is as simple as pumping pork into a pipe. You can vary your sausages with all manner of flavourings: add a little white wine, diced bacon, garlic, rosemary and thyme for a Toulouse; garlic, crushed fennel seed and a shot of red wine for authentic tasting Italian salsicci; add smoked paprika for a reasonable facsimile of chorizo or even swap pork for lamb, add a hefty dollop of harissa and create your own merguez. The world, to coin a phrase, is your sausage.

One last thought. Once you've invested time, effort and, let's face it, a few smutty giggles, into making your own sausages, it's worth going to the effort of cooking them properly. Don't, whatever you do, chuck them in a hot pan and prick them with a fork - the sausage skin does an admirable job of keeping all the lovely juices in and the nasty frying fat out so just trust that the insides are going to braise in their own loveliness. If you're worried about the fat content go suck a carrot.

The truly ideal way to cook a sausage is to poach it slowly sunk to its hips in a bath of olive oil but, failing that, massage each individually with oil first then slide them into an oiled pan and keep them rolling, on a low heat, for as long and as continuously as possible.

Trust me, even 25 minutes of gently rolling them back and forth, jostling their plumply greased little bodies against each other is not too long. As the skins change to a light tan, then begin to caramelise as the Maillard reaction takes place, you'll find yourself shifting into the perfect meditative state to honour your sausage.